There she was, about the western turn of the house, half walking and half running, with the puppy sometimes keeping his feet and sometimes swung dizzily in the air on the rope that Gabrielle was carrying and the little dog biting in a frenzy of joy. There was warm sweet light in the garden at five o’clock, the day had been balmy enough to make cooler airs at its close almost a relief.
Pleasant domestic sounds in the barnyard were all about: clucks and moos, John whistling, and the stamping of big horses’ feet on distant floors. The scent of violets and syringa, of lilacs and new grass, of damply turned, sun-warmed earth was like a delicious sharp and heady ether in the air.
David joined the girl just as she and the dog were turning down a rambling sort of back road that led toward the sea; Gabrielle turned, and although indeed she smiled, he saw that she was an older and a soberer Gabrielle than the little schoolgirl of the Christmas holidays. They walked the quarter mile to the shore deep in a conversation he had not anticipated; she talked of her mother, whose life was a question only of days now, and made one allusion to the deeper cause of pain to herself.
“My finding out about myself—about my mother’s never having been married, David—has made a sort of change in everything to me,” she said, unemotionally. “I seem to feel now that I must do something—that it is more than ever my duty to do something to make my own place in life and stand upon my own feet. That’s the only way that I can ever be happy, and I will be happy so, believe me!” she added, nervously intercepting an interruption from him. “Doctor Ensicoe, from Crowchester, says that my mother will not outlive the month. And then I mean to write to the nuns in Boston and stay with them until I find something that I can do. I know Aunt Flora will help me, for indeed she offered to most generously, and, while I must—I will let her. She was very kind about it all,” Gabrielle added, reaching safer waters now, and so speaking more quietly. “We have never spoken of it except at that one time. I said to her quite suddenly, one night when we were going up to my mother’s room—I’d had it terribly on my mind, of course, ‘Aunt Flora, answer me one question. There would be no use in my attempting to trace Charpentier, my father, would there? There is no record of that marriage, is there? That is the real reason for all the mystery and secrecy, isn’t it?’ And she turned very pale,” went on Gay, “and answered, ‘Yes.’ We never alluded to it again, although many times since she has told me that Sylvia would always take care of me—that I must not worry!” And catching a sudden look of determination and interest in David’s face Gay went on hurriedly, “But indeed I don’t worry, I shall get along splendidly and make you all proud of me!”
A sensation of pity so sudden and acute as to dry his mouth and press like a pain behind his eyes silenced David for a moment. Then he said:
“But you are very young, Gay, and inexperienced, to face all the ugliness and coldness of the world. Suppose,” David added, conscious suddenly of the quickened beat of his heart, “there was some other plan that eased, or helped to ease, all those worries of yours——?”
“Oh, my God,” Gay prayed, in a very panic of fear. “Oh, David,” she cried, in the deeps of her being, “spare me! Oh, God, don’t let him mean that he is going to ask me to marry him. Oh, no—no—no!”
Aloud she said nothing. They were on the sweet, grassy cliffs above the sea, now, and Gay was looking out across the level stretches of the peaceful water, over which shone the last of the long day’s light.
She was so beautiful, as she stood there, that for a moment David was content to look at her and tell himself that he had not remembered how lovely she was. Loose delicate tendrils of her tawny hair were blowing about her white temples; there was a delicate creamy glow on her warm, colourless skin, her great eyes seemed to give forth a starry shimmer of their own. In the fine hands, encircled at the wrists, as David had anticipated they would be, by transparent white cuffs, she held the restless puppy against the young curve of her breast; in the old garden and the spring sunset she looked like a slender, serious impersonation of Memory or Poetry, or of some mythical young goddess, wandering under the great trees.
But it was not only the physical beauty that he saw. He saw in her too the dearly companionable girl of the past mid-winter, whose husky, sweet laughter had rung out over the card table, whose eager helpful interest had made bright so many a dark sleety morning in the upstairs studio, when the oil stove slowly warmed the air and scented it with hot metal and kerosene vapours. He saw her buttoning on the big coat, tramping through snowy woods at his side, with her hands deep in her pockets, and her bright face glowing like a rose. And a first little chilling fear crept over his bright dream; suppose—suppose she was not for him, after all?